Gaming laptops are as much a contest of engineering bravado as they are an attempt at portability and practicality. Meet the case in point: Acer’s new Predator 21 X gaming laptop.
Its components are excessive, and it is the first ever such machine with a curved display — a 21-inch, 2560 x 1080 resolution IPS display to be exact. We first, and now we know the whole package will run you an eye-popping $8,999.
Acer announced the price at CES 2017 today and says it will be available starting in February.The Predator 21 X is of course hideous, with rough, protruding black and silver edges and a gaudy blue dragon stock graphic slapped above the keyboard. (The graphic is at least customizable.) It looks not too far off from a military laptop you’d see in the background of an action movie’s oversimplified hacking scene. But then again, you’re not buying the Predator 21 X for its looks. You’re buying the device for its sheer and absurd level of power, illogically stuffed into a package that’s only portable if you’re willing to carry around a 17.6-pound clamshell monstrosity. This is the most absurd 'laptop' of all time.Posted by on Friday, September 2, 2016The reassuring news: its components are up to the task. The Predator 21 X features two GeForce GTX 1080 X graphics cards linked with Nvidia’s SLI tech, a brand-new seventh-generation Intel Core i7 processor, four DDR4 slots for up to 64GB of RAM, and up to four 512GB solid state drives, in the event you need unearthly data transfer speeds.
Discover all Predator 21 X features, technical specifications and more. The official website for Predator Laptops. Sep 19, 2017 - How much is too much? Even better, why not more? That's the question Acer's Predator 21 X asks by purely existing. An exercise in excess, the.
Two of those drives can also be NVMe PCIe SSDs, which is a complicated way of saying they’re about five times faster than standard SATA drives thanks to updated interface specifications. The standard hard drive configuration on the Predator 21 X will be 2TB. This ludicrous engineering feat weighs 17.6 poundsAcer throws in some other add-ons to make the laptop’s nearly five-figure price tag only slightly less jaw-dropping. There’s Tobii eye-tracking built in, a mechanical keyboard with customizable backlight options, and the numeric keypad flips over to transform it into a touchpad. There are also four speakers and two subwoofers, for outsize sound performance, and five cooling fans.Still, it’s quite obvious Acer made this to flex its engineering muscles, and not because anyone but the most affluent and hardcore would think this product was a logical and well-spent $8,999. If you’re so inclined, you can be one of the first 300 customers and get a limited edition series number engraved into the graphics panel, preferably next to the giant blue dragon head. For the rest of us, well.
We can only dream — or maybe dream of what else we might afford with that money. The 12-inch MacBook fits neatly inside the Predator 21 X’s massive clamshell case.On the more moderate side of the spectrum, Acer is trotting out some more affordable and practical options for portable gaming. The companion device to the Predator 21 X is the Predator 17X, which starts at $2,599 and understandably trades out some of the more ludicrous perks of the wildly more expensive version. You still get Intel’s latest Kaby Lake i7 processor, as well as the four DDR4 slots that top out at 64GB of RAM. However, the Predator 17X packs just one GTX 1080 X GPU and limits the type of solid state configurations you can achieve.
Acer also trades the massive 21-inch curved display for a 17.3-inch G-Sync screen.And for those who simply cannot or will not shell out more than $2,000 for a laptop, Acer is announcing a few new additions to its Aspire line. The new V 15 and V 17 Nitro notebooks are being updated with Intel’s Kaby Lake processors. They will cost $1,119 and $1,299, respectively and both will be ready to ship in February. Meanwhile, the Aspire VX 15 gaming laptop, which ships later this month, will start at $799 and pack Intel’s latest processor alongside less powerful Nvidia graphics. All three machines come with 15.6-inch displays.They are, of course, more portable and practical than the Predator 21 X, but they are noticeably less ludicrous.
That is the trade-off.
Pushing the Definition of LaptopMeasuring 3.27 by 22.36 by 12.38 inches (HWD) and weighing 18.6 pounds, the Predator 21 X pushes the boundaries of what you can actually call a laptop. It's so massive that anyone short of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson would have trouble holding it perched on his or her lap.
It may fit the definition of a self-enclosed, transportable computer, but you'll tire yourself out if you move it further than from your den to your patio. This system is more akin to an all-in-one desktop with a screen you can fold down, rather than grab-and-go laptop. The 21-inch curved screen, with 2,560 by 1,080 resolution and 21:9 aspect ratio, is part of the reason for its large body.
The screen specs allow more visuals, like a full screen for CinemaScope-wide movies or two or three game windows side by side, to be displayed.The curve helps you view the wide expanse from a few feet away without having to pivot your head. During our testing, the screen looked great, with clear visuals and nary a hint of artifacts or pixelation. Brightness is excellent, and with few reflections. The display also has a 120Hz refresh rate and is Nvidia G-Sync certified, which translates into smoother animation with fewer glitches like tearing and blurring during game play.A major nit: The display isn't 4K resolution (4,096 by 2,160), which is crazy given the $9,000 price. Other high-end gaming laptops like the Razer Blade Pro and the, our latest top picks, have 17-inch 4K (3,840 by 2,160) screens.
Being able to display native 4K content would provide an even more immersive experience. Sweet Mechanical Keyboard. The showy mechanical keyboard uses Cherry MX Brown switches, which have some tactile feedback, but aren't as clicky as traditional MX Blue switches. Some professional and enthusiast gamers prefer the solid feel and rapid response of mechanical key switches over the shallow scissor switches on most gaming laptops. The depth of the key switches is another reason that the system is so big: they need a couple of inches of vertical clearance, so the keyboard is farther from the screen. The keys have 4mm of travel, and actuate after about 2mm.
You can replace the WASD keys and space bar with the blue key caps included with the laptop, or customize them later with third-party key caps. Acer includes a detachable magnetic palm rest.The keyboard features RGB lighting (16.7 million colors), which is fully customizable in Acer's Predator Sense utility. Each key can be lit with an individual color or by zones, and can be matched to, or contrast with, the light strips on the lid and laptop body. The lighting is attractive, and broadcasts that this is a high-end gaming laptop.To the right of the keyboard is a removable panel with a touchpad on one side, and a numeric keypad on the other.
Some gamers prefer to use the keypad, particularly if they also use a USB for control. This setup is a bit more flexible than the and its successor, the, both of which embed a light-up touch-sensitive numeric keypad in their touchpads, a solution that lacks tactile feedback. There's a row of five programmable macro keys to the left of the main keys, which we appreciate in a gaming laptop keyboard. You can program them to chain key combinations, like your favorite attack sequences, or use them to cycle the laptop's overclocking features, as is set by default.A lightbar embedded in the laptop's hinge houses the sensors for the Tobii eye-tracking system. Tobii keeps track of what you're looking at on the screen, and works with features in games that support the technology. For example, it can shave milliseconds of reaction time in games like The Division or Watch Dogs 2, just by looking at the target. We found the technology to be responsive and not too intrusive, but it does take some time to get used to.
Wall of SoundThe Predator 21 X has six speakers in its voluminous chassis. There are two tweeters and two midrange speakers on either side of the keyboard and two bass drivers/subwoofers on the bottom panel. Together, they produce enough sound to entertain a dorm room party, or impress visitors during a gaming session. Playing back our usual mix of trailers and sound files filled a medium to large room.There are five fans to cool the system: two for each of the GPUs, one for the CPU, and two to force cooling air over the rest of the system. The CPU fan is lit, and shows through a clear panel above the keyboard. The fans are self-cleaning, so they remove dust automatically, and the CPU and GPU fans are made of metal for longevity. You can use the Acer Predator Sense utility to manually control the fans, up to the point that the noise drowns out conversations in the area, but we found our best results using the default automatic setting.
In testing, the fans didn't spin up too loud, even when we were running benchmarks with the CPU and GPU overclocked.Supporting all of these high-end features requires two AC power adapters that, along with the bracket that holds them together, weigh 7.53 pounds and even further prohibit portability. This is a similar setup to the Acer's small form factor gaming desktops like the, which also require two power jacks or a power strip. Combined with the weight of the laptop itself, you're carrying over 26 pounds of electronics. Connectivity is extensive, but that's not surprising, since there's so much real estate on the chassis.
You'll find a headset jack, a microphone jack, an SD card reader, and two USB 3.0 ports on the left side of the laptop. On the right, there's another pair of USB 3.0 ports and a Kensington lock port. On the back, there are the two AC adapter jacks, an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, two DisplayPorts, and a port with technology.
802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1 handle wireless connections. The system will support up to four external displays, or three and the internal display, simultaneously, and has more than enough power and connectivity to work with returned slower numbers, due to their 4K screens and single GTX 1080 GPUs.
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This puts a fine point on our claims that it's a shame that the Predator 21 X lacks a 4K screen, because it could drive one smoothly. The laptop's performance on day-to-day tasks was average for this overpowered pack, but it will be many years before the system starts to feel slow. For example, it only took 59 seconds to complete our Handbrake test, and 2:05 to finish the Photoshop test.
Any Handbrake test score below one minute is phenomenal, as are Photoshop times below four minutes.The one exception is battery life. None of the gaming laptops compared above broke the four-hour barrier, but the Razer Blade Pro was close (3:48).
The other three laptops clustered around the two-hour limit, with the Predator bringing up the rear at 2:05. Keep the power bricks handy, because you'll need them any time you perform a task more complicated than watching a movie or surfing the web. Powerful, but Barely PortableAs an example of what a manufacturer can do, given an unlimited budget, the Acer Predator 21 X mostly succeeds. It's one of the fastest laptops we've tested, with the largest screen we've seen on a portable PC.
It costs as much as one of the exquisite desktop gaming rigs like the, though you'd have even less incentive to move that monolith once you've set it up. The Predator 21 X barely meets the definition of transportable, but it's far too bulky to bring to your friends' house every day, the price far exceeds current top picks for high-end gaming laptops, and we're still left wanting a 4K resolution screen. Because of these factors, we'd still steer well-heeled gamers toward the Editors' Choice Origin EON17-X 10 Series or the Razer Blade Pro.